Figure 3. Changing function without losing information.

a Left: Mutual information I along straight-line paths in parameter space between pairs of 10 randomly chosen optimally informative model solutions for a particular network (inset). For each path, the starting and ending solution’s locations in parameter space are denoted θ⃗₁ and θ⃗₂, respectively, on the horizontal axis. The minimum mutual information I₀ along each path is marked with a triangle. A specific function is performed at each of the ten solutions (as characterised in Methods); seven of the ten functions are unique. Right: Distribution of I₀ values built from paths between 37 randomly chosen solutions for the inset network, of which the ten solutions used for the left plot are a subset

b Means (circles) and standard deviations (error bars) of I₀ distributions like that in (a) (right), for all networks studied; 37 randomly chosen solutions were used to build each network’s distribution. Networks are shown on the horizontal axis, in the same order as in Fig. 2, i.e. ranked by evolvability score E